


it's been a long, long time

by maidenstar



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, with brief cameos from trip and jemma bc i'm trash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-04 23:13:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3096113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maidenstar/pseuds/maidenstar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The irony of what happens to her is lost on absolutely no one."</p><p> <i>Peggy wakes up 61 years after the day she almost died. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	it's been a long, long time

The irony of what happens to her is lost on absolutely no one.

In fact, the irony is so acute as to be downright cruel, and there’s no doubt that absolutely anyone involved would have done most anything to avoid it if they’d had even a little forewarning.

The problem is that one is seldom forewarned about these types of things. Indeed, when _it_ happens, it happens fast. There’s simply no time to cobble together a better response than the one they resort to.

The end of the war still looms over everything, wasted and withered, seven years past, but it feels rather as though the SSR has pulled itself into as close a sense of normality and routine as such an organisation could ever muster. Much of the world is slowly being rebuilt, though Europe’s war wounds are still too raw to have even scarred over yet. To the best of their knowledge, Peggy Carter and the SSR, along with the Colonel, Howard and what’s left of the Howling Commandos, have dismantled the final HYDRA outposts, and the only HYDRA agents not dead or incarcerated are the scientists and technicians that have been subsumed into the SSR, under the parameters of Operation Paperclip. The old Allies do their best with the side of Germany they have under their control, while the Soviets continue to do as they please in their half, while everyone else does their best to try and covertly stop them.

What’s more, with the Nazis defeated, the America that emerges from the war doesn’t find itself lacking in a grand enemy for too long, as the Soviets are quickly painted as the newest threat to world order. (And clearly some things never change, because America and its allies always did have a way with extreme hypocrisy). Of course, having always been at least slightly privy to the behind-the-lines workings of the war, Peggy, Howard and those close to them had always known that good ol’ Uncle Joe was not the friendly father figure America had needed him to appear to be. That image had always been a wholly manufactured one.

And, though they don’t know it at the time, their new enemy shows themselves as such when they’re all on an intel mission, one that should have been safe and fast and effortless, when, suddenly, she gets hit. No one ever gets a clear visual on who does it, there’s only a figure far off in the distance, tall and muscular and masked, a bright flash of silver at his right side.

The Commandos burst into action immediately, getting her straight back to Howard and the med team. But they were unprepared for any engagement on this mission and have scant few supplies. Besides, her condition is critical. Some want to give up, but Howard cannot bring himself to. It’s meant to be capitalised-and-italicised- _Top-Secret_ , but the SSR have had him working on trying to replicate Erskine’s special ‘Captain America in a bottle’ serum, even though he has learnt better than anyone that it’s all about the type of person you inject, not on what’s in the syringe. But in the instant that he has to decide, out there in the field, with Peggy bleeding out onto his combat gear, he knows he believes in Peggy Carter.

Injecting her with the half-finished serum is a decision he’ll come to look back upon many times with a great deal of guilt and confusion. The liquid, reassuringly as blue as the one successful batch, goes into her body and for a second her breathing shudders to a halt. It is only when everyone has all but lost hope that it starts back up again.

But that is all that happens.

Her body goes into shock, or something of the kind. She doesn’t wake up, but she doesn’t die either. She is left frozen and perhaps it is not in the way Rogers was, but it’s too familiar to the likes of Howard and the Commandos not to leave a bitter taste in their mouths.

At first she’s under for so long, anyone with enough medical knowledge to be allowed anywhere near the SSR’s laboratories assumes she must be brain dead, because no one can be unconscious for as long as she is and hope to recover. But brain scans and other tests show that this simply is not true. They are left to assume that the serum strengthened her and pushed her body into base survival mode. That it had shut itself down to try and combat her blood loss and drop in blood pressure. That, for all intents and purposes, she is in a very deep sleep. A deep sleep that no one knows how to rouse her from. No one knows if it is even safe for them to try to do so.

She is something of a mid-twentieth century fairytale, though if she could, she would scoff at the implications that brought.

She’s left for years like that, with no one really sure what to do for - or to - her. Any attempts to bring her back to consciousness would quite literally be do or die situations, and often people simply do not have the confidence in their medicines or machines to take the risk. Even after he is killed, Howard’s name still has too much sway for anyone - even decades removed from Peggy Carter’s legacy - to want to risk her demise, especially after she’s hung on for so long.

At one point, she’s almost forgotten about completely, left in some forgotten corner of SHIELD’s Sci-Ops Department under the care of an ever-changing group of SHIELD scientists, all sworn to complete secrecy. The SSR has become SHIELD by the time developments start being made and when she eventually wakes, it is to an almost entirely new world.

 

* * *

 

Waking hurts. In almost every way possible.

It’s terrifying enough to find herself in a room filled with machines and objects that look like they’ve come straight out of a H. G. Wells novel. It doesn’t help that she has no idea whatsoever about where this strange room is located, or why she should be there.

Her first thought is kidnap, and she sits up and attempts to leave the bed so fast she almost pulls her IV line clean out. Wincing and sliding her fingers over the strange pink tape keeping the line in place, she settles herself down on the thin mattress again, but remains sitting up. She had always thought, having seen what the SSR and HYDRA could do, that little in the way of technological advancements could ever really shock her. How wrong she’d been.

She doesn’t have long to consider this misjudgement, as something must have alerted whoever is currently attending to her (or guarding her room) to her attempts to get out of bed. A line of people come darting into the room, looking equal parts alarmed and confused.

She thinks mildly that if they’re worried about her escaping then they needn’t bother. Her head is thick and slow and she feels almost completely incapacitated. It’s not a feeling she enjoys, she seldom fails to stay in control of herself and the sense of panic churning in her stomach only increases as, when she attempts to demand to know what’s going on, her voice sticks in her throat, rusty and uncooperative, presumably from disuse.

No one seems to know what to say to her. They’re all standing in a line, faces pictures of shock and apprehension. Each person sports an official-looking badge, pinned to various parts of their bodies, clamped onto garments the likes of which she’s never seen in her whole life. One man’s pants look like the overalls factory workers would wear, but they’re an unsightly indigo colour and hug far too tightly to his legs, all the way down to the ankles. The woman beside him is wearing a floral-print dress that is quite becoming, but has a neckline lower than any item of clothing Peggy has ever seen. She can’t help but notice that all of these people look incredibly young.

It’s only once she’s appraised the small cluster of people in front of her that she considers what she is herself wearing. She’s dressed in a nightdress or slip of sorts; pale and thin and papery. It’s far from decent, especially with so many other people in the room, but this is hardly the time for modesty.

Eventually, someone steps forward. “A-Agent…Carter?” her voice tapers upwards enquiringly, but goes so high that it sounds so unsure of herself that it seems as though she does not really want to speak at all.

Her throat has cleared enough to allow her some speech, so she replies, with as much dignity and authority as she can muster,

“Of _course_.”

Without any further regard to her, the man with the tight factory pants turns to the woman next to him and says simply,

“We do _not_ have the clearance for this.”

 

* * *

 

She probably hasn’t moved in about forty minutes, and the rational part of her, buried somewhere deep down, knows she probably gone into shock.

She’d eventually found the voice to demand, as haughtily as possible, to know what was going on. The little group had huddled together, whispering anxiously and in a way that seemed extremely discourteous. Eventually, one had stepped forward, and the others had left.

“You’re in a SHIELD facility, we’re what used to be the SSR. You’ve been asleep Agent Carter. For sixty-one years.”

At first, she point-blank refuses to believe it. The woman is surprisingly patient, and explains what little she knows about the chain of events that had led Peggy here. She collects a device from a table across the room and uses its screen to show her what she said were newspapers – the images so bright and clear that it hurts the space behind Peggy’s eyes. She is shown the dates of countless consecutive periodicals, as though that proved anything. But deep down, Peggy had a distinct feeling of discomfort settling her stomach, one said that this was all real.

All of the machines, the clothes, the devices. She’d thought them _futuristic_.

“I can imagine how difficult this must be for you…”

This causes a flare of anger to rise in her chest.

_No. No-one can imagine how difficult this is._

She immediately asks to be left alone, and the woman complies, asking her not to leave the room and explaining that they’d have another scientist, a better informed one, in soon enough.

 

* * *

 

As it happens, they send in countless scientists. Man after man enters and exits, each with little or no regard for the possibility that she might have preferred a female attention in that instant.                                                        

She was far from worried about any kind of medical gaze from _anyone_ , but right now she’s all out of sorts, and there’s something distinctly unsettling about the way the men all come in, one after the other, and examine her without so much as asking if she minds. They’re all clearly interested in her, but it’s the sort of unguarded fascination she’d seen a hundred times on Howard’s face as he talked her through his newest prototype.

 _Howard_.

Her heart lurches instantly at the thought, her reaction so strong that for a moment one of the machines she seems to be connected to changes its rhythmic beeping. The current doctor looks over at a screen, startled, and asks her if she is alright.

 _Would_ he _be alright in this situation_?

No, he concedes. No we wouldn’t be alright.

He leaves soon after, and she can’t bring herself to feel bad about being so hostile.

The room was quiet for quite some time before the door opens again, and Peggy feels her patience wearing thin. What more could there possibly be to discuss at this moment?

“Agent Carter? May I come in?” The woman’s accent seems to hit a spot right in the centre of her chest. She’d barely spent much time in her native London after the war, but the woman’s voice suddenly somehow sounds like home.

“Yes, of course.” Peggy hates how tired and weak her own voice sounds, but at least this one had had the good grace to ask permission to enter.

The woman that approaches her looks just as young as the first agents had, and is wearing black pants just as tight as those of the man before. A strange flash of emotion darts across her face, lighting up her eyes, before she tamps it down, crossing the room slowly and picking up a clipboard with a thick wad of paper tamped onto it.

Without looking up, and seemingly a little awkwardly, she checks that Peggy now knows that she’d been injected with the SSR’s first attempt at recreating the supersoldier serum used on Steve.

She does. She’s struck by a moment of curiosity.

“Did they ever succeed? Make another serum that worked?”

The younger woman seems startled by this question for a moment but, to her credit, recovers quickly.

“No. Not to my knowledge, at least.”

The agent has been instructed to take samples of Peggy’s blood, and she takes more than seems strictly necessary. When she speaks again, it’s clear that she’s extending her answer to Peggy’s earlier question about the serum. She tilts the tray full of samples. “They’re still trying, though.”

After a pause, the agent speaks again.

“They’re going to assign you various different counsellors, to try and help you adjust,” for the first time since she’d walked in, the woman drops her professional demeanour for just a second, allowing herself a tiny smile at the look on Peggy’s face. “It won’t be as awful as it sounds, some of the counsellors here are really quite good. I can’t imagine what you’re going through, and while they probably won’t be able to either, they’ll be able to try and help you adapt since, well…” she hesitates, breathes in one long, steadying breath before continuing, “SHIELD’s done this before.”

She asks the obvious question, the one she senses the agent needing her to ask. “Have there been more like me?”

“Well, you see, they also wanted me to tell you…and I’m not really sure how to say this but…they found Captain America just off of Greenland a little while back now. He was still alive, but frozen somehow. It defied _all_ medical science…a little like you have. And, well, he woke. Perhaps a year or so ago now. He’s…alive, Agent Carter.”

She feels like she’s been physically struck, and for a moment her mind swims. She wonders if this is all some terrible, elaborate practical joke, but the woman’s expression is all unguarded honesty, tinged with a little fear.

The words tumble out of her mouth before she even has time to consider what she’s saying.

“I want to see him.”

There’s a moment where she thinks the woman might refuse her. However, she merely nods, and then hurries out of the room.

 

* * *

 

Apparently, however, even in the early 21st century, one does not simply just have instant access to Captain America.

She’s informed the next day that he’s away on SHIELD business, and that they will alert her once he has returned. They provide no timeframe for any of this.

She does receive a visitor, however, though she neither expects nor especially desires this development. The man is tall, sturdily built and clearly a SHIELD operative. He’s got an easy smile and a face that Peggy wants to think she recognises, but that’s impossible.

He has enough courtesy to knock on the door first, and to ask permission to enter. She’s still feeling exhausted and overwhelmed enough that she’s close to refusing him (apparently supersoldier serum and an impossibly long slumber come with a whole host of side effects. Who'd have thought?), but she changes her mind at the last minute.

He ducks his head as he crosses the room and sits in the chair that had been left beside her bed the previous day.

“Agent Carter, it’s a real privilege to meet you.”

She doesn’t know what to say to that, so remains silent.

“My name’s Antoine Triplett, and my grandpa Gabe…” he pauses, drawing a hand across the back of his neck, and her heart jumps, thinking that she knows _exactly_ where she recognises this man from. “Well, he told me a lot about you.”

 

* * *

 

“H-hello?” she’s clutching the receiver too tightly to her face, and she can feel heat rising to her ear and the side of her head. Her counsellors still don’t think she’s ready to entertain any more guests, or to venture into the outside world, but they do eventually decide to allow her a phone call about a fortnight later.

They’re still a little strange to her, the tiny, flat contraptions that people now call phones, and she’s grateful when they allow her to use one that still resembles at least slightly the telephones she knew from before.

Steve has been told to telephone her, so someone must have told him everything about her somehow being here, in this world. She wonders who it was, and how he reacted. She wonders if he’s as silent as he is now, the noiseless moment fizzling with an electric charge, even they could conceivably be thousands of miles away as they speak - or rather, don't.

“Peggy?” his voice is thick, and she feels her own throat tightening at hearing the familiar cadence of his voice, deep and smooth and soothing.

Her eyes are threatening tears, and she has absolutely no desire to cry in front of the handful of people in the room so she grasps about for something to say, eyes falling to the clock in the corner of the room. It reads 15:13, though she had expected the call at 15:00.

So, she says the only thing she can think of in that moment.

“You’re late. _Again_.”

He chuckles down the phone, and the sound seems to wrap around her. She finds herself laughing too, the sound a little too thick and wet from her tears to be truly uplifting, and she almost forgets that she has an audience.

“I’m given to believe that the technology now is a lot more reliable than before, so I hope you have a decent excuse…”

 

* * *

 

In all, the telephone call goes well, but the first time he visits is an unmitigated disaster. 

Neither of them really knows how they should act around the other.              

It feels thoroughly uncomfortable to see him in modern attire, though she’s suddenly far less perturbed by this 21st century fashion for tight clothes.

The shoulders of his jacket are damp and glistening as he shrugs it off, hanging it up on the hooks by the door of the private room she’s been given. She still hasn’t been allowed outdoors yet, and is really starting to chafe under the constant gaze of doctors and scientists and counsellors. A few brazen snowflakes still cling in Steve’s hair as he hovers uneasily, reminding her that it is winter somewhere out there. Gradually the flakes melt, fading to nothing, and still he hovers.

His face can’t seem to settle on any one expression, his eyes darting from her, around the room and then back to her again. This indecisiveness seems to reflect everything she herself is feeling - an overwhelming force of uncertainty and fear, mingled strangely with the relief of seeing him, seemingly alive and well, and the strange burn of a feeling that she’d held within her for a long time. A four-letter feeling that she never did allow herself the luxury of naming, even back then. _Especially_ back then, when things were so uncertain and no one knew who would live or who would die. It's ironic, really.

He hasn’t forgotten his courtesy at least, is perfectly charming as he gains her permission to kiss her on the cheek, and to sit down in an empty chair beside the bed. They speak eventually, and they are civil and calm and polite. Except they were never once any of those things together before, not when it was just the two of them.

Outside of any official setting, they’d always been all playful scorn and sarcasm, scalding one-liners and quips as quick as the minds they each possessed. They’d always been honest with each other, but this conversation is anything but honest. They each put on a mask, because neither knows where they really stand anymore. He tells her about his own experiences of waking up here (and at least _she_ didn’t destroy a whole room and run amok in the city) and of his new life. He seems to have a new team, The Avengers, and he tells her a little about their first, dramatic outing together, but it’s a conversation that’s all facts without any real substance.

When he eventually takes his leave, she does not feel any better for having seen him.

This new world suddenly feels wide open again, as it had before she’d found out he was still alive, but the feeling is not a positive one. It is like an empty house with the door flung open, all the cold air getting inside. 

 

* * *

 

The next time she sees him, they sit across a window table at a little establishment in the city that serves coffee and a small array of cakes and treats.

He meets her outside, whole countenance more relaxed than last time, and as he holds the door open and lets her pass, he assures that the coffee here is one thing that’s inarguably _better_ than what they left behind.

She agrees after her first sip, but still reminds him that he’s remembering wartime coffee, and wartime food. 

He shrugs, spreading his palms and concedes that she has a fair point.

“Did they make you eat the terrible canteen food after you woke?” she asks him quietly, fingers worrying the edge of a paper napkin beside her cup. They’re a million miles away from the thick cloth napkins or handmade doilies that establishments used to provide, and though she _is_ trying not to be too disparaging, she can’t stop herself thinking that these thin, papery things are a good metaphor for so much of what she’s experiencing of this new world.

Not, to be fair, that she’s seen all that much of it yet. But she’s at least been outside a few times now, escorted once or twice by Howard’s brash and ostentatious son, Anthony. She’s also had a little more time to brush up on her history, and now that she and Steve on neutral ground, and she feels she has something of value to contribute to their conversation, things suddenly seem a lot easier between them.

She’s slowly starting to feel a little more as though she can hold her own in this strange place, feels internally a little more of that confidence she’s been trying to project on the outside.

“They did,” he tells her with a knowing smile, eyes gleaming. “Who’d have thought they could make peacetime food taste as bad as the war stuff.”

She laughs, genuinely, and lets herself bask in the warmth of the moment, watching people pass by the little café. It’s mid-December now, and everyone seems to be laden down with bags full of expensive gifts. It’s a far cry from the festive seasons either of them ever experienced.

“Do you ever wonder how accurately we recall those times?” she asks eventually. “Such hardship, such uncertainty about the future. And yet I don’t ever remember feeling so alive…”

“I understand,” he says after a pause, and he speaks so seriously that she does not doubt him for a moment.

He smiles at her, a highly comforting action, and she returns the gesture. They’re silent again – comfortably so – and she takes the opportunity to study him. She’d hardly dared look at him last time, such was the tension of the moment, and suddenly she feels every one of the years she spent unconscious and cut off from everything, cut off from him.

He looks achingly lovely, all high cheekbones and sweeping angles in the dim, soft light of the café, and though she is still somewhat confused by this seemingly ubiquitous 21st century preference for keeping shop patrons in the dark, she’s not unappreciative of the effects in that moment.

Their talk grows easier and more companionable as they finish their drinks, and they while away a good few hours like that.

As they exit, she accepts his suggestion that they take a walk.

“Tell me if you want to leave, though. I know first-hand how quickly this place can overwhelm you. I still feel it sometimes, even now,” he admits, ducking his head sheepishly.

“I’ll be sure to watch how I go,” she tells him, throwing caution to the wind and craning up to kiss his cheek, lips lingering longer than strictly necessary.

His skin is pleasantly warm in comparison to the icy winter air, and she feels him smile at the contact.

 

* * *

 

They meet four or five more times before he finally kisses her. Properly. But, clichéd as it sounds, it’s worth the wait.

Not the kiss itself (though Peggy has no complaints there), but they’re finally back to where they left off, finally back to themselves. Things feel normal between them again (well, as normal as _they’ll_ ever be) and the moment only benefits from this fact.   

There are many more kisses to follow, and as Peggy passes every physical and mental challenge SHIELD throws at her, their shackles gradually start growing looser. She’s pretty sure that, like Steve, they’re never going to fully relinquish their hold, (she’ll probably end up working for them, but that’s the only type of work she has ever known, ever wanted) but she finally feels as though she’s able to start living again.

She starts to rebuild her life, structuring her days around him, around _them_. She slowly gets to know the new city, taking it in amongst the festive twinkling lights and the shining carpets of snow. They spend Christmas together – Steve has a modest tree and decorations in his apartment, but they don’t bother with any unnecessary gifts, just attend a nice, simple service, make lunch together and go for a quiet walk.

In the end, she stays the night, thankful – not for the first time – of the lax modern-day standards of propriety.

 

* * *

 

Despite how well things have been going, the slow approach of the New Year rattles her, for some reason. It’s all pure symbolism of course, marking some strange dividing line between the years as though it’s not all completely arbitrary, but she feels as though she’s only just gotten used to  _this_ year. She’s not sure she really wants to herald a new one in just yet.

Besides, she can’t help but wonder how people go about celebrating New Year now. She remembers the parties she would attend before the war, lots of glamorous people in glamorous joints. She supposes things probably aren’t that different.

Sat across the room, Steve watches her as she broods, picking up easily on her thoughtful mood, and even more easily on the reasons why she is so quiet. They always did understand each other so well, had discovered that they still did.

Suddenly, he stands. He pulls her coat and scarf off of the hooks by the door, holding them out to her.

“Come on. There’s something I want to show you.” 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Peggy has hardly known this world for more than a month or so, and yet she finds herself preparing to put a whole year behind her. 

She knows that the immediate future is going to be tough. Even standing in amongst the lights and the crowds is slightly overwhelming for her, and for a moment she idly wonders how she’d be coping if Steve wasn’t right beside her. She finds comfort not so much in the way he places gentle hand on her shoulder, but in the way it reminds her that is not alone in experiencing this. It reminds her that he too has experienced this strange clash of memory, the splintering of _then_ into _now_ in a way so acute it could give one a headache.

There are countless people weaving about the streets, all with their own lives and their own stories, all with their own secrets and cupboard-dwelling skeletons, but Peggy can’t help but think that she and Steve had to be the strangest pair amongst them. Perhaps it wasn’t true, perhaps that was all just narcissism and underestimation, but with everything that has happened to them, she can’t help but wonder.

It’s all so complicated, and her head swims a little trying to think of it all, trying to tally up their past with the possibility of their future, once so lost to them both.

At midnight, as fireworks light the sky (it’s beautiful, but it makes her think faintly of war, makes her imagine she’s watching an air strike through a kaleidoscope), his lips find her own. It still feels strange that people are so keen to show affection so publicly now, but she’s willing to let it slide for the sake of ‘tradition’. Amongst other things. Such as the fact that she really does like that she gets to do this.

And although she’d been dreading this obscure transition of time, as they stand under this strange, multi-coloured sky, the future has never seemed further way, has never seemed so overshadowed by the pleasant weight of the present.

After all, they both have doses of supersoldier serums coursing round their bodies with every pump of their hearts. They’ll work it out. They have a long, long time. 


End file.
